Have you ever wondered about the origins of words? Words are the building units of languages, involves cultural heritages and mirror social structure of communes. Us, the people, have hundreds of worth telling stories in history. Especially, the etymology of the words has the most astonishing ones. In this article we will focus on the word origins from ancient times that people associated with astrological events. Let’s look at these interesting words.
Firstly, we can find lots of astrological marks of the old ages in today’s West languages. Those times, people firmly believed in the influence of stars and planets. For instance, the English word “disaster” meant “bad star” in Greek. Also the word, “bad star”, was thought to have caused catastrophes such as earthquakes.
For another example, we can focus on the meaning of the word “influence”. It also has its origins from ancient times and is linked with astrology. It means effect and comes from Italian word “influenza”. Word’s actual purport (meaning) is the “influence of stars”. It was used to describe the astrological power of stars that influenced human behaviour.
The word for examining carefully, “consider” comes from Latin. The word is derived from “con” and “siderer”. (“Con” means “with” and “siderer” means “to observe”.) Now, be careful about the hidden syllable in the word “siderer”: there is “sid”, which is the Latin root of “star”. As you can understand, consider means “thinking carefully by looking at the stars”. For an additional info, examining carefully by looking at the star was pretty a serious job in old times. According to the mortality statics in London, in 1632, there were 9548 deaths because of “being defeated by planets and stars”. Surprisingly, this number was more than the number of deaths from cancer.
To conclude, the curiosity made people try to understand the mystery of space. This led them make connections between life and universe; as the origins of “disaster”, “influence” and “consider” also indicate. Therefore, we should appreciate their struggles to make life meaningful. What do you think about the ancient people’s belief in astrological powers? Even today, people who believe in these powers still exist. There are astrology pages on news, daily zodiac predictions on the net. Are they just the lies or do they have a nugget of truth?
Appendix:
Image 1: Viacheslav Lopatin/Shutterstock.Com
Comments